Blog
Cup Sizes Around the World: 236, 250 or 284 ml
« One cup » names three different volumes depending on where the recipe was written. The US cup holds 236.6 ml, the metric cup 250 ml, the old imperial cup 284 ml — a 20 % spread hidden behind a single word.
The three cups in circulation
Cup conventions track the history of measurement itself — and none of them agreed on a size.
- US cup: 236.6 ml — the convention behind American recipes and most food blogs
- Metric cup: 250 ml — Australia, New Zealand and the modern kitchens of the metric world
- Imperial cup: 284.1 ml — older British cookbooks, from before metrication
What the gap does to flour
In all-purpose flour (0.529 g/ml), the three cups weigh about 125 g, 132 g and 150 g. On a three-cup recipe that is 375 g, 397 g or 451 g of flour — the imperial reading lands a fifth higher than the American intent, enough to turn a tender crumb into a dry one.
Spoons and ounces follow the same split
The smaller measures diverge less but still diverge: a US tablespoon is 14.79 ml against a metric 15 ml, a US fluid ounce 29.57 ml — and the weight ounce is a different unit entirely at 28.35 g, equal to its liquid namesake only for water. Recipes that mix cups, ounces and pounds assume you know which ounce is which; most never say.
Reading recipes by country
US recipes mean the 236.6 ml cup and spell weights in ounces and pounds. Modern British and Australian baking books publish grams outright; their older editions and reprints still speak imperial cups. Canadian kitchens straddle the border — metric packaging, American-influenced recipes — and France barely uses the cup at all: grams and decilitres are the native units.
Why the errors compound
Convention is only the first layer. Fill technique adds ±8 % on flour — ±10 % on almond flour — so a cook who reads « 2 cups » as 500 ml and then packs the measure can run 15 % or more over the intended weight. That is how the same recipe succeeds in one kitchen and fails in another, with both cooks certain they followed it exactly.
One fix across all borders
The gram is the only unit every country shares. The converters on this site let you pick the cup convention the recipe was written in — US, metric or imperial — and hand you back grams that behave identically in every kitchen on earth.